You Can’t Shake the Knicks Out of an Utterly Mad Fan Like Spike Lee

Spike Lee, in the alley of the Longacre Theater on West 48th Street, where his production “Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth” began its 12-show run on July 31.Credit
Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

So the question hangs there, big as a basketball.

Will this man in his “Republic of Brooklyn” shirt, this filmmaker who made the borough of his childhood a living, breathing character in six movies over 26 years, now forsake his beloved New York Knicks and root for the Brooklyn Nets?

Spike Lee shoots a sideways glance suggesting the reporter is guilty of early morning drug use.

“I wish I had a dollar for every time people ask me that — I could finance another film,” he says. “No, no and no. Can’t do that. Can’t.

“I am orange and blue, baby,” he says in reference to the colors of the Knicks. “Orange and blue.”

Suburban nomads, the Nets will open in Downtown Brooklyn in the fall after a 46-year Off Broadway run on Long Island and in New Jersey.

Fans, united for generations behind the New York Knicks however dispiriting the ownership (James Dolan, please report to the courtesy desk), the team or the lack of victories, have an alternative. Dislike the peevish fashion in which Mr. Dolan discarded point guard Jeremy Lin? Embarrassed that Knicks management saw fit to drop confetti to celebrate that the team won a game — a single, solitary, first-round game — against the Miami Heat?

Sports loyalties are splendidly irrational, and rarely surrendered. And a glowering Knicks versus Nets rivalry comes laden with subtext: There is a shift in the perceived hipness quotient from Manhattan to Brooklyn, not to mention complications of class, race, gentrification and borough identity. If you look hard enough, there’s probably a foodie subtext.

We asked Mr. Lee, 55, to ruminate on all this. He came of age within a few hundred yards of the Nets’ new arena; he helped establish a black artistic renaissance in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, in the 1980s; and he remains the personification of the utterly mad Knicks fan.

Mr. Lee talked while sitting atop the outdoor stairs that rise at the intersection of Broadway and Seventh Avenue, looking south at the caffeinated nuttiness of Times Square. Surrounded by tourists, in his Yankees cap and lime-green neon sneakers, he is a celebrity hiding in plain sight.

He waves his arms at the scene. (Caution: The difficulty for a writer bound by The New York Times’s style is that Spike Lee is gorgeously fluent in New Yorkese, including our birthright use of a certain four-letter word as verb, noun, adjective and adverb.)

“The diversity of this place is great,” he says. “But if every” New Yorker “is a millionaire, then New York City is going to suck!”

Mr. Lee lived in Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill as a child. Then his mother, the family real estate visionary, bought a brownstone in Fort Greene for the princely sum of $40,000.

He cackles. Gentrification and its discontents are never-ending New York obsessions; why shy away?

“I want everyone to live together in peace and harmony,” he says. “But let’s be honest, sometimes white folks move into Harlem, move into Bed-Stuy, and Fort Greene, and ‘Bogart’ like they’ve been there forever.

“That’s that Christopher Columbus” stuff, he says. “You can’t act like you been there forever.”

He chuckles again. “Although I will concede the garbage pickup in Fort Greene is a lot better since they moved in.”

Mr. Lee is about to release “Red Hook Summer,” yet another of his Brooklyn films that explore religion, race, gentrification and sex in the, God help it, ever more hip neighborhood of Red Hook. With a commanding performance by Clarke Peters as a Baptist preacher, it is the sort of ambitious, dangerous and self-financed film that fewer filmmakers attempt anymore.

Photo

Mr. Lee during a Philadelphia 76ers game against the New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden this year.Credit
James Devaney/WireImage

Most of the film’s action takes place in the public houses, ringed on all sides by gentry. “Tell me where people move when they get pushed out? After you get to Coney Island, it’s the Atlantic Ocean. What they going to do, put public houses on stilts out there?”

“Yo!”

Enough ruminating. Mr. Lee is yelling at four young people sitting on the stairs. “Hey, y’know, you wearing that Chicago Cubs shirt — how can you wear that [unprintable word].”

The youths turn around, startled, then laughing.

“All I know,” Mr. Lee continues, smiling broadly, “is that it’s 19-[unprintable word]-08 since the Cubs won the World Series!”

They offer him a Cubs shirt. He recoils in mock horror. “Can’t take a Cubs shirt, no way.”

Laughing, he returns to the interview and confides: “I mean, like I should be talking? I’m kidding this guy about his Cubs shirt and it’s been 40 years for the Knicks.”

Mr. Lee’s sports fandom has a Zelig-like quality. Long before he made his reputation as a director, he was a connoisseur of iconic moments. Willis Reed limps on to Madison Square Garden’s floor for Game 7 in 1970? Thirteen-year-old Spike was there. Mookie Wilson squibs a grounder through Bill Buckner’s legs in Game 6 of the 1986 Mets/Red Sox World Series? He was there, too.

No act of Knicks management/mismanagement has pushed more fans toward the Nets than losing Mr. Lin. It remains a sort of urban mystery to Mr. Lee, like why the doors on the local subway always close just as the express arrives.

Mr. Lee is not inclined to second-guess the point guard for taking the money. He even gets leaving the old neighborhood; Mr. Lee relocated from Fort Greene to Manhattan’s East Side because fans were ringing his doorbell at 4 a.m.

But who leaves New York?

“Orange and blue, the mecca and all the love he got here?” Mr. Lee shakes his head. “Has he ever tried walking around Houston?”

Whatever. Mr. Lee will be there when Mr. Lin returns to the Garden as a Houston Rocket. He’ll watch Mr. Lin snake down the lane, and he’ll expect the Knicks to do what they must.

The conversation turns back to all those underachieving athletes he cheers for from his front row seat in the Garden.

He frowns.

“Look, I hope Carmelo Anthony saw LeBron holding that championship trophy. Amar’e’s my man. But I’m tired of looking up at those old championship banners.

“No lollygagging, no half-stepping, no shenanigans, no tomfoolery. Got to get serious, got to.”

He expects “a craaaaazy game” when the Knicks appear at the Nets home opener. But he reminds you one last time where he stands.

“Orange and blue. My son is going to be orange and blue, and his son after him. And they are going to bury me in these colors.”

He pauses a beat.

“In Brooklyn.”

A version of this article appears in print on August 4, 2012, on page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: You Can’t Shake the Knicks Out of an Utterly Mad Fan Like Spike Lee. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe